In this installment of Science Policy IRL, host Jason Lloyd goes behind the scenes of the White House Fellowship program with Lav Varshney, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Varshney served as a White House Fellow from 2022 to 2023, where he worked at the National Security Council with Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology.

In this episode, Varshney describes the day-to-day experience of working at the White House, gaps in the innovation system that science policy can help fill, and how making artificial intelligence systems more transparent could define the future of AI applications.

Resources: 

• Want to become a White House Fellow? Applications open November 1, 2024. 

• As a White House Fellow, Lav Varshney contributed to the Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.

• Read Varshney’s contributions to Issues: a review of a biography of the information technology pioneer Claude Shannon and an assessment of how intellectual property rights can keep up with advances in artificial intelligence with coauthor Deepak Somaya. 

• Visit Kocree to try out AI music generation and Ensaras to learn more about using AI to monitor wastewater. 

• Visit the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research to learn more about Varshney’s work on making AI systems more transparent through information lattice learning.